A Corner of the Veil

When I was first sent to prison, my mother visited me weekly. She lived North of Boston, about a ninety minute drive from Concord, NH. She was usually brought here by my sister and her husband or by my younger brother. I was very concerned about how my imprisonment affected my mother. The mothers of most priests enjoy a sort of vicarious respect that they cherish with pride. My mother was visiting her priest-son in prison.

My mother was painfully aware that I could have left prison after only one or two years had I been willing to plead guilty to something that never took place. I knew she knew this. One day when we were alone during a visit, I took her hand and asked her if she was disappointed that I did not take a “deal” for the easy way out. She pondered this for a moment, squeezed my hand, and said,

“No, I would have been disappointed if you lived a lie. There’s no freedom in living a lie. I want you to fight for the truth.”

I was very proud of my mother, for in those few simple words she, too, put herself and her pride aside for principle. A few days after our visit, my mother sent me a simple card. It was a quote from Winston Churchill, plain white text on a black background, “Never, ever, ever give Up!” It was one of my treasures. The card spent several years on my cell wall, then disappeared one day, lost – as are many such things when I was moved from place to place in the prison.

In the years to follow, my mother became very ill. Her visits were fewer and further between. I witnessed the digression as she appeared in the prison visiting room one day with a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair – and then I saw her no more. Over the next two years, I could only speak with my mother by telephone. In the last year of her life, my mother and I could not speak at all.

It was a special agony to know that my mother was dying just seventy miles away. As her son and as a priest, I had lost any means to offer support for her except through prayer. I wrote to a priest-friend in Boston, Franciscan Father Raymond Mann, who graciously prepared my mother spiritually for death in my stead. I was most grateful to him, and to my sister and her family who cared for our mother every moment of her last years in this life. On November 5, 2006, my mother died.

Most of you cannot imagine being unable to see or comfort a loved one dying just seventy miles away. There is a barrier between the imprisoned and the free – almost as impenetrable as the barrier between the living and the dead. My duty as her son and as a priest would be carried out in silence in my own heart.

REDEMPTIVE SACRIFICE

When I saw the Mel Gibson film, “The Passion of the Christ,” I was struck by the powerful, silent scenes in which Mary viewed her Son’s path to Calvary from a short distance, and yet could not touch him, could not speak to him. I felt as though I was living the reverse of those scenes, that I witnessed from the far side of an abyss the suffering and death of my mother, and could not be present. It was as though I had died before her – already, but not yet.

I was angry. As her son and as a priest, being present to my mother in death was a sacred duty, but one denied to her and to me through the false witness of accusers and the enticement of money- an enticement that has played a far greater role in the Church’s scandal than our bishops and the plaintiff lawyers will admit. How could I not be angry?

One of the great temptations I have had to face in prison is the impulse to keep a litany of losses. It is a naturally human response to injustice, but the resentment to ensue would be a spiritually toxic weapon of self-destruction.

My first post on These Stone Walls was “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.” In it, I described something that occurred just six weeks after the death of my mother. I had been standing at the mirror in my cell shaving on the morning of December 23, 2006. I suddenly realized that the equation of my life had just changed, that on that very day I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else.

The sense of loss and futility was overwhelming until later that same day when I received in the mail an image of Father Maximilian Kolbe in both his Franciscan habit and his prison uniform. You’ll have to read my first three posts to understand this. It may be a good way to begin Advent. Don’t worry, they’re brief. I was less long-winded then!

I described in those posts my encounter with St. Maximilian Kolbe just at the point at which the equation changed – the point at which more of my life as a priest was spent in prison than in freedom. Father Kolbe’s sacrifice of his life for another made me realize the power that exists in sacrifice and especially in the sacrifice of unjust suffering. I have come to know without doubt that suffering offered for another is redemptive of both.

It’s a difficult concept for someone on the wrong end of injustice to grasp, and I struggled with it at first. I began to offer my days in prison as a share in the suffering of Christ in the final weeks of my mother’s life. It was all I had to give her.

NEWFOUNDLAND

My mother, Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, emigrated to the United States from Newfoundland at age 22 in 1949. The oldest of six, she was close to her three sisters and two brothers who remained in Newfoundland. My mother was closest in age and in friendship to her sister, Frances, two years younger.

In 2003, my mother visited her childhood home for the last time. She sent me a terrific photograph of herself with her sister, Frances at Logy Bay, just north of St. John’s on the Avalon Peninsula where they grew up.

It was the only photo I had of my mother in her last years. I put the photo away, and then lost it. When my mother died, I searched my cell for the photo, but it was gone. It’s difficult for prisoners to hold onto such things. Prisoners’ cells are routinely searched – sometimes even ransacked in the process – and we have very little ability to preserve items we treasure such as photographs. The photo of my mother was lost.

“I kept silence there and noticed a beautiful fragrance of flowers. As I prayed, the fragrance grew stronger, and I felt transported by a presence that was beyond my understanding.”

Father Longenecker – who hosts the Standing on My Head blog – wrote 0f 0ther phenomena that defy logical explanation in our repository of faith experience. He wrote of Padre Pio’s stigmata, apparitions of the Blessed Mother, healings in the presence of sacred relics. In a later issue of This Rock, Father Longenecker took some heat for what was wrongly interpreted as his dismissal of such experiences.

I found his article to be respectful and serious, with but one small flaw. Father Longenecker later questioned what, exactly, happened to him in that chapel before the body of St. Bernadette, and suggested that we need to be both believing and skeptical.

“Whenever a natural explanation for a seemingly supernatural event is available,” he wrote, “it is to be preferred.”

But why should natural explanations preclude the miraculous? Naturally occurring events can be powerful catalysts of actual grace, and as such they seem miraculous. We have all had the experience of coincidence that is so unlikely, so personally shaking that it defies explanation. Who hasn’t picked up the telephone to call a loved one only to find that person already there calling you?

It seems a minor miracle when it happens, something inexplicable and astonishing, then the experience slowly diminishes as doubt and natural skepticism reinterpret the event for us. The task of getting on with life causes us to shrug off the experience over time. Sometimes the balance between belief and skepticism in the modern world can lean too heavily toward the latter.

I wrote of such an event in “A Shower of Roses” in October. While accompanying teenage Michelle through the last weeks of her life, I spoke of St. Therese, the Little Flower, who promised a shower of roses. Michelle, a day away from death, pointed at the ceiling where drifted a helium balloon with a vivid rose imprinted upon it. It left me stunned – for awhile, but in time the trials of life diminished the light of that event. How common are the signs and wonders that come to people of faith? Can we always see them when they arrive?

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Shakespeare called death, “The Undiscovered Country.” I know many people who have suffered the death of someone they love. Think, in the midst of that suffering, of the incredible gift that it contains. Loss is not felt at all but for love, and love is a direct result of grace. It is what folds back a corner of the veil – what links the living to the dead. We have something very special to share with those whose physical life is lost to us: the grace of redemptive suffering, the hope of our prayers, the sacrifice of our trials.

Eight months after my mother’s death, I learned that her beloved sister, Frances, died in Newfoundland. She died on July 10,2007, but I did not learn of it for several days. Prisoners cannot be reached by telephone, so it was July 14th when I received my sister’s letter about the death of my aunt. The next day, July 15th, was my mother’s birthday, the first since her death the previous November. A few minutes before 8:00 AM I turned on my small television to celebrate Mass with the Franciscan community on EWTN. I wanted to offer Mass for my mother and her sister whose death I learned of just the night before.

Just as Mass began, a prisoner came to my cell to borrow a book. I was irritated. Couldn’t he wait? I had to pull a foot locker from under my bunk and rummage for the book. I found the book and handed it to him. Turning back to EWTN, I said a silent prayer of intent to offer the Mass for the soul of my mother on her birthday, and for the soul of her sister Frances.

Then the other prisoner was back! “This was in the book,” he said as he propped a photograph against my small TV screen. It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier – the photo I searched for in vain when my mother died. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday – at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister – their last photograph together found me.

An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace.

When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side – my mother on the right – on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land.

About Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

The late Cardinal Avery Dulles and The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus encouraged Father MacRae to write. Cardinal Dulles wrote in 2005: “Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent, and spiritually sound will be a monument to your trials.” READ MORE

Comments

I was Chaplain in two Federal Penitentiary in (Alberta) Canada and let me tell you that I know what you are talking about. It’s soooo painful for the parents and for the children to feel what the parents are going through. The Sacred of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary are your recourse. The suffering on both side has to be redemptive, because justice is not always made in a trial. Far from it. Anyhow, I want to tell you Father Mac Rae that I have adoration every Sunday from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and I pray for you. I stay united with you while you celebrate your Mass. May Our Blessed Mother envelope with Her Maternal Love. Sr Elisabeth Coulombe

Whoa, Father G, this is one really good post! It is like reading a novel with a sudden twist in the end. And the thing is, the twist is for REAL, that it did happen, as opposed to those fictional events churning in the novelist’s head.

Enjoyed it tremendously.

Now I can go back to where I left off.

Thank you.
Asking for your priestly blessings for my family and me, especially these days.

Father, what a blessing you are to us! Thank you for sharing your faith from a place of such sorrow. I love what you wrote in another post, that a great temptation was not to keep a litany of losses. Amen, here too.

My mother passed from this life on Nov. 20,1997. I have never ceased to miss her deeply. Recently my mother-in-law died and that event re-opened the wound in my soul.

Your words..”Think, in the midst of that suffering, of the incredible gift that it contains. Loss is not felt at all but for love, and love is a direct result of grace. It is what folds back a corner of the veil – what links the living to the dead. We have something very special to share with those whose physical life is lost to us: the grace of redemptive suffering, the hope of our prayers, the sacrifice of our trials.”

Thank you, Father! That paragraph was as soothing as an ointment on a featering wound. Now I feel that I am co-operating with grace and not wallowing in self pity. Thank you for freeing me from my own mental prison. (another paradox, eh?)

I pray for you everyday. I KNOW you are one of God’s favorite sons. Be strong, Father!

By the way your mother reminded me of my maternal grandmother, there is a remarkable resemblance.

Thank you for the Mass for mothers. I’m sorry to say I regret not treating my Mother with more respect. In her last few years life I fought to keep her at home where she wanted to be. That comforts me. Now I am preparing my self to consecrate myself to Jesus through Mary at the end of this month. It will be something I can offer in memorandum to my Mother whom I miss dearly, but also I want to honor Our Blessed Mother whom I love more and more daily. God be with you always.

Your application of Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country” in not only impressively imaginative and rich– it is also poignantly profound given the context and situation. You’re a very strong, resilient, and sensitive man.

I think of Mom every day and I am sometimes reminded of our visits together to Concord. We followed the same route visit after visit and at a specific juncture before exiting Rt. 93, she would always pull from her pocketbook the same crumpled up directions she had someone jot down for her initially. We would have a chuckle over it together. I would always say how I longed for the day she felt secure enough in my driving abilities to forget to produce the little piece of paper from her purse. When after a couple of years of visiting Gordon together I finally had a feeling that I had accomplished that goal… then I missed the exit.

Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, 1941, Harrow School

Dear Father
What a beautiful post. Thank you for sharing it. You are in my thoughts and my prayers always. Please pray for my mum Irene waiting for open heart surgery and keep her safe. Our mothers and fathers are, who make us the people we are, and i know your mother would have been so proud of you fighting on for the justice you so richly deserve. God bless you always

Father, I pray your mother rests in peace knowing there are mothers on earth praying for you. I expect Our Lady got together with her to send you some spiritual mothers to look out for you down here. What a wonderful miraculous event, the finding of the photograph, I believe strongly in miracles. May Our Lady wrap her mantle around you and protect you from all harm.

Thank you, Father, for sending this post which touches me profoundly. How comforting it is to find such tangible signs of God’s love. Sister Miriam Therese Winter calls serendipity sacramental because it is there that God’s grace intersects with our lives. Once I started to recognize such gifts, I began seeing them everywhere.

I shall keep your cause close to my heart. The cross you’ve been carrying for so many years is one of the most dreadful I think. How closely it must bind you to all those similarly falsely accused and imprisoned. May your growth in grace and compassion help those without your faith.

“personally miraculous gifts of actual grace”. This is a beautiful way to think of these special moments in our lives when we experience things we can’t explain away. I have had my share. I appreciate this writing so much Father. Thanks for sharing this with us. Your dear mother must have been given great grace so that she could endure the suffering that only a mother in her circumstances could understand.

And how touching to me, as a mother, to see how she was able to reach out to you through this experience of recovering her photograph. A mother’s love is surely of God. It cannot be severed. That love will live on eternally.

Thanks Father for all the little homilies you give us and the personal experiences you share. They are certainly a consolation to those of us who are very much interested and who are trying to live out our Catholic lives as Christ would want us to.
God bless you.

Oh, Father- an incredibly touching post… I don’t even have words. The courage of your mother- indeed, throughout her whole life, had to impart itself to you, otherwise how could anyone have endured as you have? Now, she is a powerful witness for you.

It’s a sweet picture of your mum and her sister. And if we can’t call what happened for the picture to be found again a miracle, then I don’t know what can. It’s in the littleness of things and their impact on us that creates the miracle- God wants us to look for the small things in life.

As always, I pray for you- and if you can keep my mum, Jane, in your prayers, I would appreciate it. God bless you, Fr.

Oh Father the reality of your cross which you carry without complaint but total trust in God’s redemptive grace is profoundly moving and very inspiring.
Your dear mother was a remarkable woman like Our Blessed Mother her heart was pierced by sorrow yet she allowed you to be strong and did not urge you to give in so as to spare herself.

I think perhaps the reason educated people sometimes are loathe to recognise or accept the miraculous is because they fear being considered unsophisticated or superstitious but I agree with you there are beautiful miraculous moments of pure gift and grace in our lives and they become more frequent as we grow in trust . Jesus asked us to become as little children and little children who are loved have total trust and live in the moment.
Thank you for this wonderful post Father. You are a light in our darkening world.